Child Welfare

Keeping Families Together

The Keeping Families Together (KFT) Initiative seeks to provide a stable foundation for unstable families that are both homeless and have lost or are at risk of losing their children to foster care. Often, the problems that lead to homelessness and the problems that require child welfare intervention overlap and compound. Parents who have no resources to learn effective parenting skills are even less functioning when foster care impacts their family unit. By offering families a supportive housing environment, parents who have lost their children to foster care, or who are at risk of doing so, can begin focusing on overcoming their challenges, knowing their children are safe in a stable and consistent home.

In summer 2009, over 14,500 children and youth were estimated homeless in New Mexico. Over the years, this number has increased substantially. Parents with children are the fastest growing segment of homelessness, now comprising roughly one-third of the total homeless population. This growing population creates challenges not only for families seeking stability, but also for the strained child welfare system that attempts to keep children protected from unstable and dangerous circumstances.

While families do not lose their children to the foster care system for being homeless, the inability to offer children a stable home often exacerbates the problems underlying a family’s loss of custody. Addressing the homelessness and child welfare issues together in the context of supportive housing increases the likelihood of long-term family stability.

Keeping Families Together, based on an innovative and evidence-based model in New York City, will create an environment for success for these families by using supportive housing as a child welfare intervention. By supporting these families to success, families can expect to see long-term outcomes in family and housing stability and the state can see the expenses required to take care of families in constant crisis lessen.

The New York KFT families saw tremendous outcomes that we hope to see with our pilot. More families stayed together. They treated their children better. They resolved their child welfare cases more quickly and they stayed clean.